Open-billed Stork

[Sanjeev Aurangabadkar]

Camera	Canon EOS 7D
Exposure	0.001 sec (1/2000)
Aperture	f/4.0
Focal Length	500 mm
ISO Speed	160
Exposure Bias	0 EV
Flash	Off, Did not fire

[Jeannean Ryman]

You did well with the exposure given the light Sanjeev. Nice feather detail. If you have any more canvas at the bottom, I would try a crop taking most of the concrete ramp (?) out of the frame, or darkening it a bit. That's the first thing my eye was drawn to. I've never seen one of these, so it's always nice to see birds I'm not familiar with. :)

[Sanjeev Aurangabadkar]

Thanks Jeannean,
The concrete in the back drop is a rock projecting out of the water. Will try to crop some of it out.
cheers

[Kerry Perkins]

Sanjeev, this is indeed an interesting species and I appreciate your postings of birds that most of us have never seen. You have a nice pose and good composition but we again need to talk about light. It appears that the sun is pretty high overhead, which means harsh light and deep shadows and in fact the brightest highlights are blown. The angle of the sun has also caused the eye and most of the face to be in shadow. It is just not possible to expose properly in these lighting situations. As for the rock in the bg, could you have taken one step to your right, or even just moved your head a bit? It is very important to remember that everything in the frame is part of the picture, as Jeff says, and we need to be mindful of that fact. The camera is unforgiving in that respect. While the human brain filters out things that are not of interest to it, the camera does not discriminate and shows everything as if it were important. Given that fact, it is up to the photographer to make sure that everything in the image is pleasing to the eye. What shooting mode did you use here? The techs seem odd with ISO 160 and f/4. As a side note, this exif data report doesn't seem to be very good at math, as .001 sec is not 1/2000th but 1/1000th. Do you know which it really was? Where does this information come from? I believe that Canon camera bodies report the exposure time as a fraction and not as a decimal number. The software that is interpreting this data has an issue. What I suspect is that it is rounding the number up from .0005 to .001, as would be the case if the precision of the data is only three decimal places, so I'm going to guess that the real value is 1/2000. While not a big deal, I think this could be misleading.

[Sanjeev Aurangabadkar]

Thanks Kerry. I admit the light was pretty harsh, it was near 10am and I had travelled 600km to get to this bird sanctuary, so made the most of it, I shot from a boat, hand held, hence could not get a better angle avoiding the rock. The Flickr site exif shows the SS I decimals. Will avoid using it. Since I was shooting BIFs the parameters were set for that.
thanks for your advice. Will take greater care.
cheers
sanjeev